


Eternal

by Pigeon_theoneandonly



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Original Character(s), Other, Romance, Romantic Tragedy, Thorian origin story, world building
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:35:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22206460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pigeon_theoneandonly/pseuds/Pigeon_theoneandonly
Summary: Dozens of cycles past, the reapers wiped out the volsparrans.  Like all sentient species to fall beneath their tyranny, all traces of their race were eradicated from the galaxy, their cities buried and their bodies burned.But one being remembered, and endeavored to preserve them until the end of time.A romantic and tragic look at a possible origin for the thorian.
Relationships: Plant alien OC / Other alien OC
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	Eternal

A drop of blood soaked the soil at the edge of my colony and I knew Ralka had come home.

I followed her stumbling progress through my trees. Halting now and again, resting one of her four hands against my trunks, trembling with her labored breath. I cannot see for any value of the word Ralka would understand. But my entire being focused on her as she made her slow way to the heart of my wood. I could not help it. When we first met long ago, she said it was uncomfortable, an entire ancient grove bearing down on her, but only because we were not yet sufficiently acquainted for her to read my intent.

The vibration of her footfalls, the patter of her bleeding, the whisper of her passage in the air swirling about my branches, all of it painted her clearly. Signals ran along my roots like the curses she muttered into my bark, _she comes, she comes._ Roosting birds felt my unease and took to the air. I rustled faintly. Unable to completely hold myself in check. She was badly hurt. Dying, I thought, thoughtlessly, the ingrained experience of thousands of creatures who had lived and died under my canopy, in the dirt we shared. But Ralka. Not Ralka.

At last she came into the cool dark and sunk wearily into a pile of my fallen leaves. Nestled amid my roots, the oldest and truest part of me. She pressed her face into the nearest, caressing it with her palm, those wonderfully articulated animal fingers moving slowly along in an unconscious and familiar pattern. “You were right.”

Part of my awareness redirected to the sky. Clear and still today, sunlight unobstructed, a good day to flower and indeed my buds had been growing for some time. Biology moves regardless of our grief. I could sense that Other brooding there, insectile, as it had for many seasons now, as its legions drove the volsparran from their own colonies. Horrors had traveled to my roots from those like me of the abominations performed there by its servant nodes. 

The fluid of her body continued to soak my ground, tasted by my root hairs. Blood, too much blood, as I feared, and sweat, but also something else. Tears.

“You were right,” she said again, more softly, cuddling into me. Letting me take her weight. Somehow, I knew she would never take it back. “I shouldn’t have gone. I should have stayed here. They don’t even realize you’re a person, I would have been safe.”

_You had to go, m_ y leaves rustled, the only comfort I could offer. I wished then, as never before, that we had met thirty thousand years ago, in my prehensile youth, before I sunk myself into this place and built my colony. Not because I needed it. Because she did. Animals are so fleeting and needy and strange. _They are your people. You had to try._

“You’re my people.” More whisper than words, a soft wind.

I could not embrace her, as she plainly wanted. I shivered my branches, and dewy pink flowers spiraled slowly downward, through limbs and leaves and soft currents of air, and alighted on her cheek like a kiss. I knew kisses; she had kissed me many times. I covered her with my petals.

She folded one into her hand. Ralka grew marginally heavier, and then she did not move at all. 

I am thousands of years old. Barring utter catastrophe, I cannot die; my roots can endure forever, through freeze and flood and fire itself. That moment, when the air sighed from her mouth and I waited and waited and waited for the next breath, lasted longer than all the rest of my years put together. 

She seeped into the soil. Eventually, some seasons later, the Other departed, and left a wasteland behind.

***

I built her tomb slowly, over four thousand years. It took time to position her remains to my satisfaction, inching her along with my own slow growth. None of the scavengers I permitted to live amongst me dared disturb her. I had learned something from Ralka, after all; the weight of my attention can send any animal fleeing, and I spared them no malevolence as I had her. 

There I grew an intricate sarcophagus. A small copse of wound trees locking over her body, for I wanted it to decompose, to return to the soil and be taken up by myself, to lend her a portion of my immortality. Atoms will outlast even I, and ours are bound together, in my wood and sap. And as I caged her bones, I turned the branches overhead to permit a shaft of sunlight, here in the darkest part of me, where I first sunk my roots. 

On sunny spring days, Ralka is clothed in blossoms again.

***

Once, long ago, Ralka attempted to explain the concept of time as volsparran saw it. I could not see how five minutes was even worth measuring. A year is barely noticeable, ten not worth recalling, a century perhaps if something particularly noteworthy occurs.

She laughed, my Ralka, and I never told her how uncomfortable that sort of rumble felt in my leaves, which curled back as though they’d sensed a tremor in the earth. She would not live a hundred years. And five minutes then seemed very dear indeed.

But I fell back into my older rhythms eventually. Forty-seven millennia passed before anyone came to replace the volsparran. By then, the earth had reclaimed their civilization, and these new inhabitants had little idea that they lived atop a tomb. It took longer for them to gain awareness of us. Longer still to trust. None of them were Ralka, but it was good to have new friends. There can only be so many colonies, and we tired of each other’s company long ago, communicating only briefly when one of us determined to flower in earnest. Our neighbors made this easier, as had the volsparran before them, happy to carry our juveniles safely to other worlds in trade through our Speakers so they need not risk the long and costly journey nature dictated. 

As with the volsparran, they did not enjoy our Speakers at first, but in time, they came to see their purpose. If any of them could hear the voice in my rustling, in the flow of sap through my trunks, in the way I watched them within my grove, as Ralka could, I do not know. Our engineered fungus gave us their voices instead.

Two thousand years after that, the Other returned, and they too were buried.

***

My kind have traveled the stars for untold eons, but always in one direction only, barring the handful of juveniles who make a habit of it before settling their roots. None of our children returned to bring word. I had no knowledge myself from before my progenitor blasted me into the void as a mere seed, a time of sleeping when I wandered countless years before alighting here. None of the colonies knew any better. 

But the Other had visited twice, now. It stood to reason they might again. And though their servants were as mindless as our own, surely, whatever cold presence dwelled there in the sky would eventually notice we are not as bushes or grass. 

So we undertook such work as had never before. Adapting our juveniles, shaping their wood with fingers and hands and strong legs, for the building. Turning ourselves to the production of chemicals and building materials within designated groves, as we had traded before, this time for our own purpose. I would learn later that we were not the first to try to save our galaxy, nor to warn. But it seemed so accomplishable then. 

We sent them forth armed with our spores, that they might speak. Some went their own way as children do. But many shared our mission, and sunk roots deep into foreign soils, ready to advise the many primitive civilizations we encountered. They flourished in our shade. Always, we told them, always you must be ready. The Other comes.

Some listened. Enough, we believed, to have a chance.

We were so ignorant in those days.

***

I was functionally immortal; my roots had endured freeze and flood and fire itself.

They could not withstand cherry lasers from a dozen of the Other, encircling my colony and driving deep into the earth, turning the very core of me to ash. Not eradicated. I spanned hundreds of acres; even they were not so thorough. But enough to break my consciousness.

I died with my roots full of screaming, my own agony and that of my sister colonies, at our destruction and our failure and our surprise that this could even happen.

I died cradling Ralka in cool depths where not even reapers could reach, both of us buried by time.

***

We passed, as all life does. And we were forgotten. Certain remnants lived on.

***

Shiala wiped the sweat from her face and sat back on her heels, squatting in the Feros dust. ExoGeni wasted no time ordering them back to the mission, scouring the surface of this dead Prothean world for technological artifacts. It was high summer in the southern hemisphere. More sweat than a Thessian sauna and not a drop of rain. 

“It’s cooler below,” said Lizbeth Baynham, emerging from the tunnel. Since the geth assault, she’d joined them more and more on these expeditions. Shiala got the impression the science team at HQ had not welcomed her back with open arms. 

“It couldn’t be any hotter.” She rose and stretched. “You found something.”

Not a question. They wouldn’t have returned so soon otherwise. Lizbeth nodded. “You need to see this. It’s… I can’t explain it.”

“Prothean?” she asked, sharply. With the slightest edge the colonists used among themselves, ever since they heard the rumors after the Battle of the Citadel, of things worse than geth and stranger than long-dead aliens. ExoGeni made clear its corporate policy did not include the spectre delusions.

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“Then what?”

“You should see it yourself.” She cleared her throat. “And you should know. We’ve got the highest spore count we’ve ever registered in the chamber we just opened up.”

That was twice as strange. Thorian spore concentrations had fallen dramatically since the node’s demise, but they were always highest in the thorian’s chamber, kilometers from where they stood now. Fear was not a common companion, but a trickle of ice flowed into her heart. “Another?”

“None that we saw.” Lizbeth blew out a breath. “Just… take a look, okay?”

Shiala pursed her lips, and descended into the dark. 

The tunnel eventually led to a small chamber, half-caved in and lit by a handful of LED torches. As she stepped inside, the room trembled, raining dust into her skull crenellations. 

“It’s stable,” said Greta Reynolds, who had stayed below. Looking more wan than usual. “Just scary as hell. We’re in sediment here, not true rock, but very compacted.”

A strange structure occupied the chamber’s heart, a tangle of rock almost like a net. “What’s that?”

“Something older. We think it’s petrified wood, unearthed and re-buried.”

“Wood?” Shiala moved closer, appraising the structure. “But this is… It had to be grown with conscious intent. The shaping of this lattice… This took centuries.”

“There’s more.” She grabbed a torch, and aimed it between the twining branches of stone. “We did a little excavation based on scans, and found this.”

The light gleamed on fossilized bones. The manner of their arrangement made clear the purpose of the grove. “It’s a tomb?”

“Seems so.” 

Shiala peered into its shadows. Confused and strangely moved. The air here felt heavy, hard to breathe, and brought whispers into her mind she’d rather forget. Things she’d experienced in her time as the thorian’s voice, images mainly, lacking in context but all the more unsettling for that. “There were massive forests…”

Greta blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

She gave herself a shake. “What’s this, here, on this trunk?”

They brought the light closer. Greta’s eyebrows bunched together. “Looks like writing.”

“It’s grown into the bark!”

“Apparently, this was someone important.”

Shiala glanced around in disbelief at the sheer time and care invested in this single burial. “The most important person in the world.”


End file.
